Death is Forever

Chinese, and had hands calloused by martial arts. He spoke with a relaxed southern California accent. Cole knew without looking at the driver’s license that one of the man’s names would be Chen. A branch of the Chen family had been established in America since 1847.
    The driver ignored the Santa Monica Freeway, where afternoon traffic was already starting to congeal. Keeping to the surface streets, the limousine reached Beverly Hills in twenty minutes. The lights were just starting to come up in the high-rises along Wilshire Boulevard and the boutiques of Rodeo Drive when the limousine pulled under the awning of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel and stopped. A uniformed bellman opened the back door.
    “I could be awhile,” Cole said to the driver.
    “I’m yours for the duration. I’ll be here whenever you’re ready.”
    Cole didn’t doubt it. The Chens would keep an eye on their ten-million-dollar gamble.

6
Beverly Hills Late afternoon
    At one corner of the Beverly Wilshire’s crowded lobby, Erin Windsor lounged unhappily in a brocaded armchair, watching the jet-setters and the Hollywood groupies pouring into the stately hotel. She would have preferred some place less grand than the Beverly Wilshire, and some location less ostentatious than Beverly Hills, but the law firm had booked the suite. Apparently they hoped to impress her.
    What a waste of time, she thought.
    Even though she’d decided to leave the arctic, she still found civilized pretensions more boring than amusing and more irritating than either.
    To help the time pass, she tried to imagine herself as the owner of a remote ranch in Australia. Although she was fascinated by the Pacific Rim, she’d never visited Australia. Now James Rosen, the family lawyer who owned a lucrative practice in Century City, had informed her that she was the owner of a “station” and a set of mineral claims. All this a gift from a man named Abelard Windsor, a great-uncle she hadn’t even known existed.
    Rosen had been able to show her the location of the Windsor holdings on maps and had even managed to dredge up some travel-guide photos of the state of Western Australia. The photos made it clear that the Kimberley Plateau wasn’t a lush, friendly kind of place. It was home to a rack-of-bones breed of beef cattle called Kimberley shorthorns, and to exotic animals that included kangaroos, long-tailed birds of prey called kites, and highly poisonous snakes called mulgas.
    Erin had been fascinated. The primitive landscape appealed to her, especially because she was on the edge of condemning herself to an indeterminate sentence in very civilized Europe.
    Other than the fact of the bequest, Rosen’s information had been sketchy. When he’d gotten tired of her questions, he’d told her that Cole Blackburn, the courier who was delivering Abelard Windsor’s will, would answer all her questions.
    Idly Erin scanned the crowd again, wondering what Cole would look like. All Rosen knew about Cole was that he was a geologist who represented the law firm involved in the administration of the Windsor estate. The law firm was well known in Australia and in Hong Kong. When pressed, Rosen admitted that the situation was unusual but hardly a cause for alarm. The law firm had excellent credentials.
    Even so, Erin had chosen a vantage point screened by the crowds in the lobby so that she might be able to pick Cole out before he spotted her. Her decision wasn’t entirely conscious. She always arranged encounters with male strangers, so that she wasn’t taken by surprise. Part of the reason was her natural reserve. Part was a caution learned at the slicing edge of a knife.
    The lobby was full of travelers with luggage and business types with expensive leather briefcases. Many of the men were tanned and appeared wealthy, but none of them stood around looking from face to passing face, hoping to find someone they had never met in the hotel lobby.
    For a moment Erin thought the casually dressed, longhaired blond male with the oversized leather rucksack might be Cole. The man had the tanned, outdoorsy look that field geologists in Alaska had. He was handsome, with fine features and a gentle smile, and it all added up to a quiet modern male who understated his masculinity. He was the sort of man Erin found herself with much of the time when she was in the world of NewYork and Europe.
    The young man had been standing near the reception desk for a few minutes, scanning the crowd, waiting